Atari is making a video games console for the first time in more than 20 years and it looks like it will be a retro machine.

For those who came in too early to remember, Atari released its first home console, the 2600, in 1977. It went on to launch several generations of consoles before it was overtaken by Nintendo, Sega and Sony, and its last full release was the Atari Jaguar in 1993.

It filed for bankruptcy in 2013, emerging a year later as a company focused largely on mobile and online casino games.

Now Atari’s chief executive Fred Chesnais told the Gamesbeat website: “We’re back in the hardware business”. It comes after the company teased a short video appearing to show the front of the console.

The “Atari Box” shows some display wood panelling, which was a signature feature of its older consoles. Chesnais said it would be based on PC technology, which means it will probably run emulator software and play classic Atari games. This means games like Pong, Pac-Man and Asteroids.

While this sounds a bit daft, retro gaming has seen a revival in recent years. Nintendo’s NES Classic Mini sold out before being controversially discontinued this year. Nintendo is reportedly working on a mini version of the NES’s successor, the Super Nintendo.

The Atari 2600, originally called the Atari VCS, was controlled with a joystick and one button, and is credited with popularising consoles that played different games on cartridges that could be switched in and out.

Around 30 million of the consoles were sold. Further hardware, the 5200 and 7800, followed before the launch of the Jaguar in 1993. However, the console suffered from a lack of support and sold just 250,000 units before it was discontinued.

Software king of the world Microsoft unveiled last year that it will be launching a super-specced Xbox One variant -- codenamed Project Scorpio and now Vole has split the beans on what they will look like.

Earlier this week Vole let a few gaming titles into the Vole hill after signing an NDA not to publish anything until today. Now it seems they all have and given us a few details about what Scorpio will mean.

Firstly Project Scorpio has 12GB of DDR5 RAM, clocked at 6.8GHz with 326 GB/s bandwidth. It will have eight CPU cores. It's a custom AMD design sporting 2.3GHz, with a 4MB L2 cache.

It ships with an HDMI-in and out, 3x USB 3.0, a SPDIF digital audio port, an IR receiver/blaster, and will support Kinect with a USB adapter.

The hacks saw Scorpio run a Forza Motorsport demo running at native 4K and Xbox One equivalent settings. It hit 60 frames per second with a substantial performance overhead. This appears to mean that Scorpio will hit its native 4K target across a range of content, with power to spare to spend on other visual improvements.

While 4K is the target, Microsoft is paying attention to 1080p users, promising that all modes will be available to them.

Yet another study has come out and denied that there is any long term psychological effects on people who play violent video games.

For those who have came in late, for the last decade or so violent video games have replaced television, movies, music hall, and witches as the cause of all humanities' ills, ranging from violent crime, declining morals and Donald Trump. Periodically a lynch mob of priests, concerned parents, nuns and retired colonels will get together to call for them to be banned.

A study released by German researchers found that playing violent video games has no long-term effects on empathy or aggression. Previously, a number of studies had suggested that playing video games could desensitize gamers toward emotional stimuli in the short term, causing them to display decreased empathy and increased aggression.

Gregor Szycik, the head researcher in the study said the research question arises first from the fact that the popularity and the quality of video games are increasing, and second, we were confronted in our clinical work with more and more patients with problematic and compulsive video game consumption.

A group of 15 males, who had played violent video games for an average of four hours everyday for the previous four years, was compared to a control group of the same size with no video game experience.

The participants were given an initial questionnaire to evaluate their capacity for empathy and aggression. They were then shown a series of images while in the fMRI scanner and asked to imagine how they would react to the situation in the images. The researchers studied the gamers' fMRI images to observe which parts of their brains were activated and compared the results to the control group.

Neither the initial questionnaire nor the fMRI findings displayed any difference in the levels of empathy or aggression for the two groups. This result suggested that any effects that video games have on perception and behavior may be short-lived.

"This study used emotionally-provocative images. The next step for us will be to analyze data collected under more valid stimulation, such as using videos to provoke an emotional response," Szycik said.

The study was the result of a collaborative effort between Gregor Szycik from Hannover Medical School, Bahram Mohammadi and Thomas F. Münte from the University of Lübeck and Bert T. te Wildt from Ruhr-University. The research article was published in the scientific journal, Frontiers in Psychology.

Nvidia has decided to impress its customers by blocking them from giving away or selling bundled games – after all punters love it when you tell them what to do with something they have bought.

According to Bit-Tech, Nvidia is adding some form of DRM to back up its existing terms and conditions forbidding such activity.

Nvidia is worried that people are seeing that bundled games aren't a mere bonus but a discount waiting to happen. You can get the game codes and trade them to flog them on.

If buyers buy multiple GPUs for an SLI/CrossFire setup they will get three copies of a game and selling them off will help reduce the cost of getting such an expensive rig.

While Nvidia expressly banned any selling on in the terms and conditions, it's a rule that has never been enforced - up to now.

Now Nvidia is the industry lead in punishing its customers and blocking the sale or trade of bundled game codes.

Nvidia is doing this by requiring the user to have the GeForce Experience software installed and running. Next the person doing the redeeming will need to have a graphics card equal to or better than the one with which the game was bundled.

There are also a few conditions which will hack off those poor customers who bought the GPU and did not want to sell the game. Firstly they have to set the game up in the same region as the purchase. This basically kills off buying a card in another part of the world or online.

Nvidia has confirmed that the first locked down games are (ironically) For Honor and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It will be interesting to see how much of a backlash this sort of thing will create.

Former playing card maker Nintendo has managed to make its first profit in four quarters thanks to its mobile gaming division.

For those who came in late, like Nintendo, the game maker did not want to touch mobile gaming with a 10-foot barge pole because it would cannibalise its portable console market. However it looks like it was wrong.

It warned that there might be trouble ahead as there are lower game downloads for its consoles.

Operating profit reached $284 million in October-December, which is 3.7 percent lower than the same period a year earlier but better than the cocaine nose-jobs of Wall Street expected.

For the year ending March, Nintendo cut its operating profit forecast by a third due to lower game software downloads for its consoles.

Nevertheless, projected income from investments and a weaker yen allowed it to almost double its net profit forecast.

In the nine months through December, the games maker said it earned $93,903,200 from mobile gaming, accessories and related merchandise, including from its first Nintendo-branded mobile game, Super Mario Run. The figure was up from $36 million in the same period a year earlier.

But the game has also received a high number of reviews from users complaining mainly about its $9.99 one-time cost, with less than 10 percent of users paying to unlock all features. Most mobile games are free to play and charge small payments for special features.

Nintendo has said it plans to release around three mobile games a year, with two titles - Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem - planned for the coming months.

Still, it continues to regard mobile gaming primarily as a means of luring players to its mainstay consoles. Nintendo's president, Tatsumi Kimishima, said at a news briefing on Tuesday that the games maker plans to move up production plans to meet orders.

Software King of the World Microsoft is planning to bring in a “game mode” for Windows 10 to spruce up PC games.

A Twitter user who goes by the name WalkingCat claimed that a new feature may be on the way in Windows 10 that improves performance when playing PC games. He found a file in a leaked version of a new update.

WalkingCat said that a dll called "gamemode" was under the bonnet of the latest build of Windows 10 (version 14997). He said that it "looks like Windows will adjust its resource allocation logic (for CPU/[graphics] etc.)" to prioritise game performance.

This is like the way that the Xbox One runs a game. The feature will reportedly launch as part of the Creators update and will be enabled for Windows Insider users soon. The Creators update will be around in spring.

Obviously, it will not work with all games and it might only be limited to those you can get from the Windows Store.

Vole has hinted that Windows 10 will have features of interest to those playing games, including new streaming and tournament features, but this is the first time we have heard of a game mode being developed. It will be interesting to see if it plays nice with the settings on GPUs or if it will create a whole new range of reasons a game might go tits up.

Games generated $91 billion worldwide in 2016, according to a report from beancounters at SuperData Research who have been adding up some numbers on Christmas Party napkins.

Most of the cash was made in the mobile game segment some $41 billion (up 18 percent), followed by $26 billion for retail games and $19 billion for free-to-play online games.

Beancountrs at SuperData said that the new categories such as virtual reality, esports, and gaming video content were small in size, but they are growing fast and holding promise for next year. Hardware firms like Sony and HTC to take the lead in 2017. Still,

Mobile gaming was driven by Pokémon Go and Clash Royale. The mobile games market has started to mature and now more closely resembles traditional games publishing, requiring ever higher production values and marketing spend. Monster Strike was the top mobile game, with $1.3 billion in revenue.

The esports market generated $892 million (up 19 percent) in revenue. A string of investments in pursuit of connecting to a new generation of media consumers has built the segment’s momentum, as major publishers like Activision, Riot Games, and EA are exploring new revenue streams for selling media rights, according to the report.

Consumers increasingly download games directly to their consoles, spending $6.6 billion on digital downloads in 2016 which has helped improve margins.

PC gaming continues to do well, earning $34 billion (up 6.7 percent) and driven largely by free-to-play online titles and downloadable games. League of Legends together with newcomers like Overwatch are driving the growth in PC games.

PC gamers also saw a big improvement with the release of a new generation of graphics cards.

Asustek says it is not concerned by an increase in the numbers of rivals trying to enter its gaming monitor turf.

Vincent Chiou, associate president of Asustek's Monitor Business Unit told Digitimes that he was not worried and the competition will help the market to see more new developments.

He said that demand for gaming and enterprise monitors was rising and overall monitor shipments were set to grow by between five to 10 percent next year. When all the dust has settled Asustek will remain the largest vendor in the gaming monitor market, Chious said.

Asustek has already been expanding the presence of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand in the gaming monitor market for many years and its strong brand recognition and marketing ability are helping the company to stay in front.

Asustek has also been pushing its monitor products into the enterprise sector. Currently, over half of Taiwan's government and education procurement orders go to Asustek which is no small feat.

In Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, Asustek's monitor shipments are expected to enjoy an on-year growth much higher than the market average in 2016 and the company is also a top-three vendor in countries including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey.

Chiou said that gaming models are 10 percent of Asustek's overall monitor shipments and Europe and North America are the main selling markets for gaming monitors with demand from Asia Pacific and China also growing strong. It has 40 percent of the Europe's gaming monitor market and half of the US market.

He said that Asustek is planning to launch a gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate soon. This uses Nvidia's G-Sync technology and Asustek's ultra-low blue light and flicker-free technologies.

Other things which are expected to arrive next year include larger sizes, higher resolution, curve panel and increased refresh rate.

From the spring, Microsoft will be releasing a new update for Windows 10 that it is calling the Creators update which will adapt Windows for games.

Microsoft will start bundling drivers with Windows Store games to improve the performance of the game once downloaded. This will work by the game download trigging Windows Update to acquire the minimum driver requirements to make sure that application works as intended.

It might not affect many gamers who often keep their drivers up-to-date, but it might help those who forget.

It will put the fear of god to those who like having complete control over the driver updates for their hardware, as this auto-download mechanism will overwrite the existing installation of the driver.

Vole will allow you to roll back the update and Microsoft might provide a way to stop the auto-download of the driver via the Windows Store when this feature arrives.